Pivotal questions executive teams ask

November 14, 2023

There’s a saying that “great leaders ask great questions”. Great executive teams also ask themselves some crucial questions…

Whilst this does apply to any team, the idea for this post came from a lunch with friend who is a member of half a dozen boards and previously led large organisations.

I asked him “what do you see as the key challenges of the leadership teams in the companies you’re involved in.”

I’ve shaped his answers in the form of three questions:

Are we focusing on the real problem to solve?

This may sound surprising…. Aren’t top teams always focusing on the key issues?

Maybe not. And there can be several reasons for that.

One is silos. Everyone is so focused on addressing the issues within their function, that they simply become blind to the broader picture.

In his book, “Good Strategy vs Bad Strategy”, Richard Rumelt talks about the importance of “diagnosing” before prescribing a strategy.

To solve the right problem, we need to diagnose effectively. Otherwise, we may indeed be working on the wrong problem.

A simple way to go deeper is the 5 WHY’s…. Whilst seemingly simplistic, if you go all the way, you will start looking at the root causes.

Another reason why executive teams may not be focusing on the real problem….is dispersion.

Are you really prioritising?

I was speaking to a client some time back – that was driving 56 change projects in parallel!

You know how many they will successfully implement? A handful at best. The others will die a silent death as another program or idea takes over.

Executive teams naturally want to maximise the organisations output. Unfortunately, at some point, the law of diminishing returns sets in and people are just overwhelmed.

Over lunch my friend gave the example of an executive team that had come up with 27 priorities – to which he said, “good start, now bring it down to 10”.

How should we prioritise? Rumelt talks about “leverage”. Whatever has the most leverage on the organisation reaching its overarching goals should be what tops the list.

If you keep the list too long, you will likely have a negative answer to the third question:

Are we actually finishing things?

My friend’s rule is: “you cannot add a new priority, unless you’ve finished something”.

Consider the juggling analogy. If you know how to juggle 3 balls…. Try moving to 5. Without time and practice, you will drop all the balls.

That’s exactly what happens when we add things without finishing other things first.

This is true at individual, team, organisation levels.

But if the top team behaves like this, you will spread a culture of unfinished business and lack of accountability. You will dilute resources, focus, and impact.

Finishing things is hard. Find those in your organisations that love to finish things off and make sure they enforce that discipline in critical areas.

Jakob